1746-1828 Goya is considered the 18th Century's foremost painter and etcher of Spanish culture, known for his realistic scenes of battles, bullfights and human corruption. Goya lived during a time of upheaval in Spain that included war with France, the Inquisition, the rule of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, as the King of Spain and, finally, the reign of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Experts proclaim these events -- and Goya's deafness as a result of an illness in 1793 -- as central to understanding Goya's work, which frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion. From the 1770s he was a royal court painter for Charles III and Charles IV, and when Bonaparte took the throne in 1809, Goya swore fealty to the new king. When the crown was restored to Spain's Ferdinand VII (1814), Goya, in spite of his earlier allegiance to the French king, was reinstated as royal painter. After 1824 he lived in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux until his death, reportedly because of political differences with Ferdinand. Over his long career he created hundreds of paintings, etchings, and lithographs, among them Maya Clothed and Maya Nude (1798-1800); Caprichos (1799-82); The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (1814); Disasters of War (1810-20); and The Black Paintings (1820-23).   Related Paintings of Francisco Goya :. | Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta | Adoration of the Name of God by Angels | the third of may 1808 | La Gallina Ciega | Ni mas ni menos |
Related Artists:
MIJN, George van der
Flemish Painter, 1719-1783
RICCI, Marco
Italian Painter, 1676-1730 Painter, printmaker and stage designer, nephew of (1) Sebastiano Ricci. He probably began his career in Venice in the late 1690s as his uncle's pupil, concentrating on history paintings (untraced). Having murdered a gondolier in a tavern brawl, he fled to Split in Dalmatia, where he remained for four years and was apprenticed to a landscape painter (Temanza, 1738). Once back in Venice (c. 1700) he put this training to use in painting theatrical scenery. Little is known about his early development, and it remains difficult to establish a chronology for his work. A group of restless, romantic landscapes (examples, Leeds, Temple Newsam House; Padua, Mus. Civ.), painted with lively, free strokes and formerly thought to represent his early period, have now been convincingly attributed (Moretti) to Antonio Marini (1668-1725). His earliest dated works, a tempera painting, View with Classical Ruins (1702; priv. col.), and a Landscape with Fishermen (1703; ex-Kupferstichkab., Berlin; untraced), are serene and classical, close in style to tempera paintings generally dated 1710-30. This suggests that Ricci's style did not develop much, and that strong classicizing tendencies,
Alfred Elmore
Irish-born British Painter, 1815-1881 was a Victorian history and genre painter. He was born in Cork, Ireland, the son of Dr. John Richard Elmore, a surgeon who retired from the British Army to Clonakilty. His family moved to London, where Elmore studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. His early works were in the troubadour style of Richard Parkes Bonington, but he soon graduated to religious work, notably The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket, commissioned by Daniel O'Connell for Westland Row Church in Dublin. Between 1840 and 1844 Elmore travelled across Europe, visiting Munich, Venice, Bologna, and Florence. Elmore seems to have been associated with The Clique, a group of young artists who saw themselves as followers of Hogarth and David Wilkie. According to his friend William Powell Frith he was member of the group, but since it was most active while he was in continental Europe, his involvement was probably short-lived. Most of Elmore's later works were historical narrative paintings. Religious Controversy and The Novice were implicitly anti-Catholic in character. Other paintings set episodes from Shakespeare, or the history of the French Revolution. They often contained subtle explorations of the process of creation, most importantly his two paintings about technological innovation, The Invention of the Stocking Loom (1847, Nottingham Castle Museum) and The Invention of the Combing Machine (1862, Cartwright Hall, Bradford). Both portray the process of industrialisation by depicting picturesque pre-industrial handicrafts. The inventor is supposed to be pondering these manual skills while he forms in his mind a mechanism to replace them. Elmore's best-known work is On the Brink (1865; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), a moral genre painting depicting a young woman who has lost her money gambling, and is 'on the brink' of responding to the blandishments of a seducer, who is depicted as a satan-like figure,